Bull Versus Wight

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Brit. J. International Studies 2 (1976), 101-II6 Printed in Great Britain 101

Martin Wight and the theory ofinternational relationsThe Second Martin Wight Memorial Lecture"

HEDLEYBULLTHERE is no lecture which I could feel more honoured to have beenasked to give than one which commemorates the name of Martin \'Vight.Just twenty years ago I made the same journey I have just made - fromOxford to the London School of Economics - to take up a position asassistant lecturer in the Department of International Relations. I hadnot done a course of any kind in International Relations, nor madeany serious study of it, and as I arrived in Houghton Street I wonderedhow I was to go about teaching the subject and even whether it existedat all.

It was Professor Manning who urged me to attend the lectures onInternational Theory being given by Martin Wight, then reader in theDepartment. These lectures made a profound impression on me, asthey did on all who heard them. Ever since that time I hav_efelt in theshadow of Martin Wight's thought - humbled by it, a constant borrowerfrom it, always hoping to transcend it but never able to escape from it.Until I96r, when he moved to the University of Sussex, I was his juniorcolleague. After that time I was able to keep in touch with his workthrough the meetings of the British Committee on the Theory of Inter-national Politics, for which many of his best papers were written andabout which Sir Herbert Butterfield, who originally convened theCommittee, spoke in his lecture inaugurating this series.! Since MartinWight's death in 1972 I have become more intimately acquainted withhis ideas than ever before, through being involved in the editing of hisunpublished manuscripts.

Let me say a little about this. Wight was a perfectionist who publishedvery little of his work. His writings on International Relations compriseone sixty-eight page pamphlet, published thirty years ago by ChathamHouse for one shilling and long out of print, and half a dozen chaptersin books and articles, some of the latter placed in obscure journals asif in the hope that no one would notice them. He was one of thosescholars-today, alas, sorare-who (touse aphrase ofAlbert Wohlstetter's)believe in a high ratio of thought to publication.* This was delivered on 29 January, 1976 at the London School of Economics and the

Editor is grateful for the opportunity to publish it.I.Sir Herbert Butterfield, Raison D'Etat. The Inaugural Martin WIght Memorial Lecture.


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102 MARTIN WIGHT AND THE THEORY OF JulyIt has seemed to me a task of great importance to bring more of his

work to the light of day. The task would be impossible but for theencouragement and constant help I have received from two people towhom I should like to pay tribute: Martin's wife Gabriele and his pupiland friend Harry Pitt of \Vorcester College, Oxford. That the work heleft should be published at all was not self-evident. Some of the workis unfinished. Some may never have been intended for publication. Ifitwas his judgment that the work did not meet the very high standards heset himself for publication, should his judgment not be respected? Formyself, what has weighed most is not the desire to add lustre to MartinWight's name, but my belief in the importance of the material itself andin the need to make it available to others, so that the lines of inquiryhe opened up can be taken further. Especially, perhaps, there is a needto make Martin Wight's ideas more widely available in their originalform, rather than through the second hand accounts of others, such asmyself, who have been influenced by him.

It is my hope that two and possibly three publications by MartinWight will in due course appear. The first is a series of essays on differentaspects of the modern states system and of other historical states systems,which he wrote in the last eight years of his life for meetings of theBritish Committee. The second is a revised and much expanded versionof Power Politics, the Chatham House essay of 1946 to which I referreda moment ago, the completion of which - unhappily, he did not completeit. - he saw-as his principal scholarly task.! In preparing this manuscriptI have been fortunate in securing the co-operation, as co-editor, ofCarsten Holbraad, who was MartinWight's student both at the LondonSchool of Economics and at Sussex, and in recent years has been acolleague of mine in Canberra. Thirdly, I hope that it will be possible insome form to make available to others the lectures on InternationalTheory which impressed me so deeply when I arrived at the LondonSchool of Economics and are at once the least published and the mostprofound of his contributions to International Relations. Fortunately thenotes of these lectures - detailed and immaculate in his beautifulhandwriting - have been preserved.

I propose to devote this lecture to a discussion of some of Martin\Vight's own ideas. I shall not attempt to provide a survey of his lifeand thought as a whole. Such a survey - I have sought to provide thesketch of one in the introduction to one of the forthcoming volumes -would have to deal not only with his ideas about International Relationsbut also with his ideas about the philosophy of history, about educationand about Christian theology. Itwould have to take account of his closeassociation with Arnold Toynbee, with whom he worked at ChathamHouse both on A Sttlcfy of History and on the Survey of International Affairs,and from whom he derived his commitment to universal history and hisinterest in the relationship between secular history and what he called1.Martin Wight, Power Pol it ics , Royal Institute ofInternational Affairs (London, 1946).


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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 103sacred history or divine providence. Mention would have to be made ofthe influence upon him as a very young man of Dick Sheppard, theVicar of St Martin's-in-the-Field and a founder of the Peace PledgeUnion, and of his conversion in the late 1930S to Christian pacifism, aposition to which he adhered steadfastly throughout that apparentlymost just of wars, Britain's struggle in the Second World War. Onewould have to consider the books he wrote, while a member of MargeryPerham's team at Oxford during the war, on colonial constitutions andespecially his pioneering work The Development of the Legislative Cot/neil,his only substantial contribution to technical or professional history.!An assessment would have to be made of his impact as a teacher - as ayoung schoolmaster at Haileybury, as reader at the London School ofEconomics, as Professor of History and Dean of European Studies inthe early, heroic period of the University of Sussex.I want instead to focus your attention on one part of Martin Wight'slegacy, viZ' his ideas on the Theory of International Relations. First, Ipropose briefly to state what some of these ideas were. Secondly, Ishall consider some questions that have long puzzled students of hiswork about the interpretation and assessment of these ideas. And thirdlyI shall ask what can be learnt from Martin Wight's example.

When in the 195 os \Vight was developing his lecture course at theLondon School of Economics the scientific or behaviourist movementtowards what was called "A Theory of International Relations" wasgathering strength in the United States. This movement had its rootsin dissatisfaction with what was taken to be the' crude and obsoletemethodology of existing general works about International Relations,especiallythose of Realist writers such as E. H. Carr, George F. Kennanand Hans Morgenthau, which formed the staple academic diet of thetime. The hope that inspired the behaviourists was that by develop-ing a more refined and up-to-date methodology it would be possible toarrive at a rigorously scientific body of knowledge that would help ex-plain the past, predict the future and provide. a firm basis for politicalaction.

Wight's interest in Theory of International Relations may also haveowed something to dissatisfaction with the writings of the Realists, withwhich his own essayon Power Politics had close affinities, although hiswas a dissatisfactionwith their substance rather than with their methodo-logy. But the kind of theory to which he was drawn was utterly differentfrom that which was intended by the behaviourists. He saw the Theoryof International Relations - or, as he called it, International Theory - asa study in political philosophy or political speculation pursued by way ofan examination of the main traditions of thought about InternationalRelations in the past. Whereas the behaviourist school sought a kindof theory that approximated to science his was a kind that approximatedto philosophy. Whereas they began by rejecting the literature of the

I.T he D ev elo pm en t o f th e L eg isla tiv e C ou nc il I606-I946 (London, I946).


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104 MARTIN WIGHT AND THE THEORY OF Julypast, even the immediate past - and it was the latter they had in mindwhen they spoke, rather absurdly, of "the traditionalists" - he beganwith the resolve to rediscover, to assemble and to categorize all that hadbeen said and thought on the subject throughout the ages. While thebehaviourists sought to exclude moral questions as lying beyond thescope of scientific treatment, Wight placed these questions at the centreof his inquiry. Where they hoped to arrive at "ATheory of InternationalRelations" that would put an end to disagreement and uncertaintyWight saw as the outcome of his studies simply an account of the debateamong contending theories and doctrines, of which no resolution couldbe expected.

Wight's attitude towards the behaviourists was the source of one ofmy own disagreements with him. I felt that they represented a significantchallenge and that it was important to understand them and engage indebate with them. The correct strategy, it appeared to me, was to sit attheir feet, to study their position until one could state their own argu-ments better than they could and then - when they were least suspecting -to turn on them and slaughter them in an academicMassacre of Glencoe.Wight entertained none of these bloody thoughts. He made no seriouseffort to study the behaviourists and in effect ignored them. What thisreflected, of course, was the much greater senseof confidenceand securityhe had about his own position, The idea that an approach to Theory asunhistorical and unphilosophical as this might provide a serious basisfor understanding world politics simplynever entered his head.At the heart of Martin \Vight's Theory course was the debate betweenthree groups of thinkers: the Machiavellians, the Grotians and theKantians - or, as he sometimes called them (less happily, I think) theRealists, the Rationalists and the Revolutionists. The Machiavellians hethought of crudely as "the blood and iron and immorality men," theGrotians as "the law and order and keep your word men," and theKantians as "the subversion and liberation and missionary men." Eachpattern or tradition of thought embodied a description of the nature ofinternational politics and also a set of prescriptions as to how menshould conduct themselves in it.

For the Machiavellians - who included such figures as Hobbes, Hegel,Frederick the Great, Clernenceau, the twentieth century Realists such asCarr and Morgenthau - the true description of international politicswas that it was international anarchy, awar of all against all or relationshipof pure conflict among sovereign states. To the central question ofthe Theory ofInternational Relations - "What is the nature ofinternationalsociety?" - the Machiavellians give the answer: there is no internationalsociety; what purports to be international society - the system of inter-national law, the mechanism of diplomacy or today the United Nations -is fictitious. The prescriptions advanced by the Machiavellians weresimply such as were advanced by Machiavelli in The Prince: itwas foreach state or ruler to pursue its own interest: the question of morality in


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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 105international politics, at least in the sense of moral rules which restrainedstates in their relations with one another, did not arise.

For the Grotians - among whom Wight included the classical inter-national lawyers, Locke, Burke, Castlereagh, Gladstone, FranklinRoosevelt, Churchill - international politics had to be described not asinternational anarchy but as international intercourse, a relationshipchiefly among states to be sure, but one in which there was not onlyconflict but also co-operation. To the central question of Theory ofInternational Relations the Grotians returned the answer that states,although not subject to a common superior, nevertheless formed asociety - a society that was no fiction, and whose workings could beobserved in institutions such as diplomacy, international law, the balanceof power and the concert of great powers. States in their dealings withone another were not free of moral and legal restraints: the prescriptionof the Grotians was that states were bound by the rules of this inter-national society they composed and in whose continuance they had astake.

The Kantians rejected both the Machiavellian view that internationalpolitics was about conflict among states, and the view of the Grotiansthat it was about a mixture of conflict and co-operation among states.For the Kantians it was only at a superficial and. transient level thatinternational politics was about relations among states at all; at adeeper level it was about relations among the human beings of whichstates were composed. The ultimate reality was the community of man-kind, which existed potentially, even if it did not exist actually, and wasdestined to sweep the system of states into limbo. The Kantians, likethe Grotians, appealed to international morality, but what they under-stood by this was not the rules that required states to behave as goodmembers of the society of states, but the revolutionary imperatives thatrequired allmen to work for human brotherhood. In the Kantian doctrinethe world was divided between the elect, who were faithful to thisvision of the community of mankind or civitas maxima and the damned,the heretics, who stood in its way.

This Kantian pattern of thought, according to Wight, was embodiedin the three successivewaves of Revolutionist ideology that had dividedmodern international society on horizontal rather than vertical lines:that of the Protestant Reformation, that of the French Revolution andthat of the Communist Revolution of our own times. But it was alsoembodied, he thought, in the Counter-Revolutionist ideologies to whicheach of these affirmations of horizontal solidarity gave rise: that of theCatholic Counter-Reformation, that of International Legitimism and thatof Dullesian Anti-Communism.

Having identified these three patterns of thought Wight went on totrace the distinctive doctrines that each of them put forward concerningwar, diplomacy, power, national interest, the obligation of treaties, theobligation of an individual to bear arms, the conduct of foreign policy


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106 MARTIN WIGHT AND THE THEORY OF Julyand the relations between civilized states and so-called barbarians. Itis impossible to summarize what Martin Wight had to say about thethree traditions without in some measure vulgarizing it. The impact ofhis lectures was produced not only by the grandeur of the design butalso by the detailed historical embroidery, worked out with greatsubtlety, humanity and wit and with staggering erudition. In the handsof a lesser scholar the threefold categorization would have served tosimplify and distort the complexity of international thought. But Wighthimself was the first to warn against the danger of reifying the conceptshe had suggested. He insisted that the Machiavellian, Grotian andKantian traditions' were merely paradigms, to which no actual thinkerdid more than approximate: not even Machiavelli, for example, wasin the strict sense a Machiavellian. Wight recognized that the exerciseof classifying international theories requires that we have more pigeon-holes than three and so he suggested various ways in which each of thethree traditions could be further subdivided: the Machiavellian traditioninto its aggressive and its defensive form, the Grotian tradition into itsrealist and idealist form, the Kantian tradition into its evolutionaryand its revolutionary forms, its imperialist and its cosmopolitanistforms, its historically backward-looking and its forward-looking orprogressivist forms. He was always experimenting with new ways offormulating and describing the three traditions and in some versions ofhis lectures he suggested a fourth category of what he called InvertedRevolutionists, the pacifist stream of thought represented by the earlyChristians and by Tolstoy and Gandhi. He was aware that particularinternational thinkers in many cases straddle his categories: thus he.explored, for example, the tension in Bismarck's thought between aMachiavellian perspective and a Grotian one, the tension in WoodrowWilson between a Grotian perspective and a Kantian one, and thetension in Stalinbetween a Kantian perspective and a Machiavellian one.He saw the three traditions as forming a spectrum, within which atsome points one pattern of thought merged with another, as infra-redbecomes ultra-violet.

There are three questions about Wight's ideas on International Theorythat I want to consider. First, as between the Machiavellian, the Grotianand the Kantian perspectives where did Martin Wight himself stand?This was a question that earnest students would put to him plaintivelyat the end of a lecture. Wight used to delight in keeping students guessingon this issue and went out of his way to give them as little material aspossible for speculating about it. In one of his lectures he quoted thefollowing conversation of the earl of Shaftesbury: "People differ intheir discourse and profession about these matters, but men of senseare really but of one religion. . . 'Pray, my lord, what religion is thatwhich men of sense agree in?' 'Madam,' says the earl immediately, 'menof sense never tell it.' "1

I. Busnett, Our Time, vol. i,bk. II, ch. 1.


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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSOf course, if we had to put Martin Wight into one or another of his

'Ownthree pigeon-holes there is no doubt that we should have to considerhim a Grotian. Indeed, in one of the early versions of his lecture coursehe did actually say that he regarded the Grotians or Rationalists as"the great central stream of European thought," and that he would regardit as the ideal to be a Grotian, while partaking of the realism of theMachiavellians, without their cynicism, and of the idealism of theKantians, without their fanaticism. He displayed his leaning towardthe Grotians when, in one of the chapters he wrote in DiplomaticInvestigations, he gave an account of the Grotian tradition under theheading "Western Values in International Relations", claiming thatthis tradition was especially representative of the values of Westerncivilizationbecause of its explicit connection with the political philosophyof constitutional government, and also because of its quality as a viamedia between extremes." He was attracted towards the Grotian patternof thought, I think, because he saw it as more faithful than either ofthe others to the complexity of international politics. He saw the Grotianapproach to international morality, for example, as founded upon therecognition that the moral problems of foreign policy are complex, asagainst the view of the Kantians that these problems are simple, and theview of the Machiavellians that they are non-existent. The Grotiantradition, he thought, was better able to accommodate complexitybecause it was itself a compromise that made concessions to both theMachiavellian and the Kantian points of view. The Grotian idea of thejust war, for example, was' a compromise between the Kantian idea ofthe holy war or crusade and the Machiavellian idea of war as the ultimara ti o reg tI JJ1 .The Grotian idea that power in international society shouldbe balanced and contained, was a compromise between the Kantiandemand that it should be abolished and the view of the Machiavelliansthat it was the object of the struggle. The view of the Grotians that therelations of the advanced countries with so-called barbarians should bebased on the principle of trusteeship was a compromise between theKantian notion that they should be based on liberation and assimilation,and theMachiavelliancontention that theyshould bebased on exploitation.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to force Martin Wight into theGrotian pigeon-hole. Itis a truer view of him to regard him as standingoutside the three traditions, feeling the attraction of each of them butunable to come to rest within anyone of them, and embodying in hisown life and thought the tension among them. I have mentioned thatas a young man Wight took up the position of an Inverted Revolutionistor pacifist. Power Po li tic s, which he published at the age of thirty-three,is generally thought to embody a Machiavellian Of Realist point ofview and can certainly be linked more readily to the Machiavelliantradition than to the Grotian. As he grew older, it appears to me, theGrotian elements in his thinking became stronger: they are much more1.See H. Butterfield and M. Wight (ed.), Diplomatic Investiga tions (London, 1967), pp. 89-13 I.


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108 MARTIN WIGHT AND THE THEORY OF Julyprominent in his contributions to Dip loma ti c I nv es ti ga ti on s , published in1967, than in his earlier writings and reach their highest point in theessays on states systems which he wrote in the last years of his life. Asone of the factors causing him to move closer to the Grotian perspectiveafter he came to the London School of Economics, I should not myselfdiscount the influence upon him of Professor Manning, despite thegreat contrasts in their respective approaches to the subject. I shouldnot myself dare to speculate as to whether or not Professor Manningwould classify himself as a Grotian. But certainly in his thinking theidea of international society occupies a central place and it emerges, Ithink, from the volume of essays presented to Professor Manning, towhich Martin Wight contributed along with others among Manning'sformer colleagues and students, that there are certain common elementsin the outlook of all those who worked in the Department at that time,no lessnoticeable in Wight's contribution than in the others."

But Wight was too well aware of the vulnerability of the Grotianposition ever to commit himself to it fully. He understood that it isthe perspective of the international establishment. The speeches ofGladstone in the last century and of Franklin Roosevelt in this centuryproclaimed that their respective countries should seek in their foreignpolicies to conform to the common moral standards and senseof commoninterest of international society as a whole and in so doing they providedus with some of the most memorable statements of the Grotian idea.But what \Vight asks us to notice about these two statesmen is that eachof them, at the time he spoke, was the leader of the most powerfulcountry in the world. The comfortable Grotian phrases do not come soreadily to the lips of the oppressed, the desperate or the dissatisfied. Inhis lectures, as in his contribution to The World ill Marcb I939 \Vightexpounds with remarkable detachment the critique put forward ofAnglo-French Grotian legalism by Hitler in Mein Kampf: that Britainand France, the sated imperial powers, were like successful burglarsnow trying to settle down as country gentlemen, making intermittentappearances on the magistrate's bench.s Wight asks us to reflect on thefundamental truth lying behind Hitler's tedious phrases: that Britain andFrance had got where they were by struggle, that they could not contractout of the struggle at a moment that happened to suit them, still lesscould they justify themselves in attempting to contract out of it byappealing to moral principles which they had ignored when they werecommitted to the struggle.

If Wight could recognize the force of the Machiavellian critique ofGrotian doctrines he is at first sight less capable of regarding sym-pathetically the Kantian critique of them. There was much about theKantians - "The Political Missionaries or Fanatics", as he called themI.See A. M. James (ed.), The Bases oj International Order. Euqys Presented to C. A. W ..Manning

(London, 1973)'2. See Arnold Toynbee (ed.), The World in Mard: I9}9 (London, 1952)'


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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSin earlydrafts ofhis lectures - that repelledhim.Henoteshow theKantiansbegin by repudiating all intellectual authorities, and any methodologysave the principles of pure thought, but then become enslaved to sacredbooks; the Jacobins to Rousseau, the Communists to Marx. He saw itas the central paradox of the successive waves of revolutionist andcounter-revolutionist doctrine that they aim at uniting and integratingthe family of nations but in practice divide it more deeply than it wasdivided before. He held that these internal schisms of Western inter-national society reflected the importation of attitudes which had pre-viously prevailed in the external schism of Western international societyand Islam. Just as in the Peloponnesian War the conflict between demo-cratic and oligarchical factions imported into relations among Greeksthe attitudes that previously had characterized the struggle betweenHellenism and Medism, so in modern international history the varioushorizontal conflicts we have witnessed between the faithful and theheretical reproduce and reflect the earlier struggle between the Christianand the Infidel. The view that the Turk is Antichrist gives place to theview that the Pope - or some secular equivalent of him - is Antichrist;the epitaph of this historical connection between the internal and theexternal schisms of international society being the strange doctrine ofLuther that Antichrist is the Pope and the Turk combined: the Popehis spirit and soul and the Turk his flesh and body.

Wight's in some respects negative attitude towards the Kantiantradition reflected his religious views. He saw the revolutionist andcounter-revolutionist doctrines of modern times as perversions of theNew Testament, secularized debasements of the story of the Messiah -just as he saw Hitler's National Socialism as a perversion of the OldTestament, the self-appointment of a new Chosen People. Wight wasalso repelled by progressivist doctrines of International Relations, whichare found principally, although not I think exclusively, within theKantian tradition and above all in Kant himself. One of \Vight's mostpersistent themes is that in international politics by contrast with domesticpolitics progress has not taken place in modern times; that internationalpolitics is incompatible with progressivist theory; that in progressivisttheories the conviction precedes the evidence; that "it is not a goodargument for a theory of international politics that we shall be driven todespair if we do not accept it."

Wight's rejection of the belief in progress reflects, once again, notonly his study of the evidence but his religious views. For him secularpessimismwas the counterpart of theological optimism. "Hope," as heonce wrote, "is not a political virtue; it is a theological virtue."! Wight'slack of hope about the future of the secular world was, I think, so total,so crushing that only a deeply religious person could have sustained it.This lack of hope is most dramatically expressed in his invocation of deMaistre's "occult and terrible law of the violent destruction of the

1. 'Christian Commentary', talk on the B.B.C. Home Service, 29 Oct. 1948.


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110 MARTIN WIGHT AND THE THEORY OF Julyhuman species."1It is expressed also in his thesis that war is inevitable,even though particular wars are avoidable: a view he had the fortitudeto contemplate because he was able to persuade himself that at thetheological level this did not matter.> "For what matters," he said in abroadcast in 1948, "is not whether there is going to be another war ornot, but that it should be recognised, if it comes, as an act of God's.Justice, and if it is averted, as an act of God's Mercy."3

Yet there are moments when Wight seems as much drawn towards.the Kantian tradition as towards the Machiavellian or the Grotian. Heargues, in a long discussion ofKant's Pe rpetua l Peac e, that the progressivistargument from despair, while not intellectually speaking a "good'~argument, is nevertheless not a contemptible or dishonourable one: theoptimism of a man who, like Kant, has looked into the abyss, but whosays "No, looking down makes me giddy: I can only go on climbing if Ilook upward" - such an optimism grounded in utter despair meritsrespect. \Vight also sees that the belief in progress is not the deepestelement in the Kantian tradition. The deepest element - the elementthat must draw us to it - is the moral passion to abolish suffering andsin: the moral passion of Kant's hymn to duty, of Ivan Karamazov'scry that eternal harmony is not worth the tears of one tortured child, ofLenin's burning faith that suffering is not an essential part of life. Wighttraces with care the distinction between the evolutionary Kantians, whobelieve that suffering is the cause of sin, and that if suffering can beabolished, sin can be abolished - and the revolutionary Kantians, suchas Marx and Lenin, who believe that sin is the cause of suffering, andthat suffering can be eradicated only if sin is first eradicated.

While \Vight in his maturity was personally more drawn to the Grotiantradition than to either the Machiavellian or the Kantian, the essenceof his teaching was that the truth about international politics had tobe sought not in anyone of these patterns of thought but in the debateamong them. The three elements in international politics which theyemphasized - the element of international anarchy stressed by theMachiavellians, the element of international intercourse, stressed by theGrotians and the element of the community of mankind, stressed by theKantians - are all present. Wight's argument was that any attempt todescribe the subject in terms of one of the cardinal elements to theexclusion of the others, was bound to break down.

There is a second question about what Martin Wight had to say thatI wish to consider. Is it true? Can one really categorize the history ofthought about international politics in this way? And if one can, doesan account of the debate among the three traditions really advance ourunderstanding of international politics in the twentieth century?

I believe myself that Wight tried to make too much of the debateI.Diplomat ic Inves t igat ions , op , cit. pp. 33-34.2. For Wight's discussion of the inevitability of war see 'War and International Politics',The Listener, 13 Oct. 1953. 3- See 'Christian Commentary', op. cit.


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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IIIamong the three traditions. Much that has been said about InternationalRelations in the past cannot be related significantly to these traditions atall.Wight was, I believe, too ambitious in attributing to the Machiavellians,the Grotians and the Kantians distinctive views not only about war,peace, diplomacy, intervention and other matters of InternationalRelations but about human psychology, about irony and tragedy, aboutmethodology and epistemology. There is a point at which the debateWight is describing ceases to be one that has actually taken place, andbecomes one that he has invented; at this point his work is not an exercisein the history of ideas, so much as the exposition of an imaginary philo-sophical conversation, in the manner of Plato's dialogues.Ihave already mentioned that Wight insisted that the three traditions

were only to be taken as paradigms and that he was always urging us notto take what he said about them too seriously. But one has to take itseriously, or not at all. In all of Wight's work there is an instinct forthe dramatic, a searching after superlatives - the classic expression of a pointof view, the earliest statement of it, its noblest epitaph - that is the sourceof tantalysing hypotheses and is what made his teaching so exciting.But one has to keep reminding oneself that the truth might be lessdramatic, the superlatives not applicable, the hypotheses not fully tested.Again, in all his work there is an instinctive assumption - the legacy ofToynbee's impact upon him as a young man - that there is some rhythmor pattern in the history of ideas which is there, waiting to be uncovered.But we have to recognize the possibility that in some cases the rhythmor pattern may not be there at all. The defence he was inclined to putup - that he is merely putting forward suggestive paradigms or idealtypes - will not do. It makes his position impregnable, but only at theprice of making it equivocal.

But if the account of the three traditions will not bear all the weightthat Martin Wight sought to place upon it there is no doubt that it hasa firm basis in reality. Anyone who seeks to write the history of thoughtabout International Relations that Martin Wight himself was so superblyequipped to undertake will find it essential to build on the foundationswhich he laid. His analysis of the three traditions, moreover, was pro-foundly original. There is one passage in Gierke's account of the naturallaw tradition in which the germ of the idea is stated, but I have seen noevidence that Wight was aware of this passage and in any case it doesnot entail the great structure of ideas which, when fully grown in hismind, it became.'

That his account of these past traditions of thought contributesdirectly to our understanding of contemporary international politicsthere can be no doubt. In form his course was an exercise inthe historyof ideas, but in substance it was a statement about the world, includingthe world today. It presented the issues of contemporary internationalI.See Otto von Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Sociery 1JOO to 1860 (trans. Ernest

Barker), Beacon Press, p. 85.


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112 MARTIN WIGHT AND THE THEORY OF Julypolitics in historical and philosophical depth - requiring us, whenconfronted with some description of present events or some attitudetaken up towards them, to view it as part of a series of recurrent descrip-tions or attitudes of the same kind, to identify the premises that laybehind it and to seek out the best of the arguments that had been pre-sented, down the ages, for it and against it.

Wight's approach, it appears to me, provides an antidote to the narrowand introverted character of the professional academic debate aboutInternational Relations, the in-breeding and self-absorption of thejournals and the textbooks, opening it out to wider intellectual horizons.It is striking that several of the current fashions within that professionaldebate have as their point of departure the discovery of some aspect ofthe subject which his own exposition of it has always embraced. Theidea, for example, that international politics is not just a matter ofrelations between states, but also a matter of so-called "transnational"relations among the individuals and groups that states compose, is oneto which Martin Wight's exposition affords a central place; it is the coreof the Kantian tradition. The notion which is central to the studies ofmodels of future world order, now rising to a flood in Princeton andelsewhere, that it is necessary to look beyond the framework of thesystem of sovereign states and to contemplate alternative forms ofuniversal political organization - is one with which Wight was alwaysconcerned; one has only to think of his protest against "the intellectualprejudice imposed by the sovereign state", his doctrine. (derived 'fromToynbee) that the idea of the normalcy of the system of states is anoptical illusion, and his attempt - in the essays on states systems - toexplore the geographical and chronological boundaries of the modernstates system, and to suggest some of the issues with which a generalhistorical account of the main forms of universal political organization -today, virtually uncharted territory - would have to be concerned. Therecent revival of interest, in the Western world, in Marxist or Marxist-Leninist accounts of world politics, and the important nco-Marxistanalysesof imperialism and neo-colonialism, fall into place quite naturallyin Wight's presentation of the subject - even though it is true that hewas not much interested in the economic dimension of the subject, andthat his failure to deal with the history of thought about economicaspects of International Relations is one of the points at which he isvulnerable to criticism. Above all, perhaps, the rediscovery of moralquestions by the political science profession, the realization that Inter-national Relations is about ends as well as means - which is the onlymeaning we can give to what is now so portentously called "the post-behavioural revolution" - merely takes us back to the point at whichWight began his inquiry.

Wight's approach also provided an antidote to the self-importanceand self-pity that underly the belief of each generation that its own pro-blems are unique. "One of the main purposes of university education,"


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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 113he wrote in his lecture notes, "is to escape from the Zeitgeist, from themean, narrow, provinicial spirit which is constantly assuring us thatwe are the summit of human achievement, that we stand on the edge ofunprecedented prosperity or unparalleled catastrophe, that the nextsummit conference is going to be the most fateful in history ... It is aliberation of the spirit to acquire perspective, to recognise that everygeneration is confronted by problems of the utmost subjective urgency,but that an objective grading is probably impossible; to learn that thesame moral predicaments and the same ideas have been explored before."

Is there not a danger in following these injunctions that when con-fronted by some genuinely unprecedented situation we may fail torecognize it? Does not world politics in the twentieth century reflectdevelopments - too obvious to enumerate - which it is correct to regardas without precedent, and is it not a delusion to imagine that thesedevelopments can be understood by the seeking out of historical parallelsrather than by immersing ourselves in the study of what is recent andnew, in all its individuality?

There is such a danger as this but it is not inherent in \V'ight's position.He did not maintain that every international political situation has anexact historical precedent or that fundamental change does not occur.Indeed, the conception of history as a storehouse of precedents that canbe_discovered and then applied as practical maxims of statecraft tocontemporary political issues is one which he strongly attacked. Heregarded this approach to history as the methodological gimmick of theMachiavellians - prominent in the writings of Carr and Morgenthau, asit had been earlier in those of the Social Darwinists, traceable back tothe viewofBolingbroke that "history isphilosophy teaching byexamples",and resting ultimately on Machiavelli's own assumption that laws ofpolitics could be derived from history because history took the form ofmechanically recurring cycles.

There is a third question I want to consider. In what sense did MartinWight think that theoretical inquiry in International Relations is possible?Wight's most famous article on International Theory bears the title"\Vhy Is There No International Theory?"! This leads students to ask:does he believe in International Theory or does he not? How can hedeny the existence of the enterprise he is engaged in? Brian Porter hasrecently suggested that there is no great puzzle about this: what \Vightmeant was that the student will not find the history of thought aboutInternational Relations in ready-made and accessible form: the piecesof the jigsaw puzzle have to be disinterred and put together.f This is thecorrect explanation of the title, and it is confirmed by the fact that inan early draft Wight used as his heading "Why Is There no B o c f y ofInternational Theory?"1.D i pl oma ti c I n ue st ig a ti on s , op . cit. ch. I.2. See Brian Potter's unpublished paper, 'Martin Wight's "International Theory": Some

Reflections' .8


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114 MARTIN WIGHT AND THE THEORY OF JulyBut there is a deeper problem in this article than the one posed by

its title. Wight argues that it is no accident that International Relationshas never been the subject of any great theoretical work, that there is"a kind of disharmony between international theory and diplomaticpractice, a kind of recalcitrance of international politics to being theorisedabout."! He notes that the only acknowledged classic of InternationalRelations - Thucydides on the Peloponnesian W ar - is a work not oftheory but of history. And he goes on to say that "the quality of inter-national politics, the preoccupations of diplomacy, are embodied andcommunicated less in works of political and international theory than inhistorical writings."2

Is Wight here proclaiming the ultimate heresy that after all, theoreticalunderstanding of international politics is not possible, only historicalunderstanding? Is he, so to speak, throwing in the sponge? No, he isnot; this is not what he says and all of his work in this field is a denialof it - for while that work is steeped in history it is not itself history.Wight gives us the clue a little further on when he writes that the onlykind of theoretical inquiry that is possible is "the kind of rumination abouthuman destiny to which we give the unsatisfactory name philosophy ofhistory."3

Theoretical inquiry into International Relations is therefore philo-sophical in character. It does not lead to cumulative knowledge afterthe manner of natural science. Confronted by a controversy, like thegreat debate which \Vight explores among the three traditions, we mayidentify the assumptions that are made in each camp, probe them,juxtapose them, relate them to circumstances, but we cannot expect tosettle the controversy except provisionally, on the basis of assumptionsof our own that are themselves open to debate. All of this must followonce we grant \Vight's initial assumption that theoretical inquiry intoInternational Relations isnecessarilyabout moral or prescriptive questions.

I believe myself, however, that an inquiry that is philosophical canbe more public, more rational, more disciplined than \Vight was willingto allow. In his work we may note a preference for vagueness overprecision, for poetic imagery over prosaic statement, for subjectivejudgment over explicit formulation of a line of argument. I do notthink, for example, that "rumination" is an adequate word to describethe activity of theoretical analysis. Wight speaks of the "fruitful impre-cision" of Grotius's language, but it appears to me that this imprecisionis in no way fruitful." It is true, as Wight says, that the stuff of inter-national theory is constantly bursting the bounds of the language inwhich we try to handle it, but this appears to me a reason for trying tofind a language that is appropriate. There is a tendency to believe thatthose who are profound, as Martin Wight undoubtedly was, are therebylicensed to be obscure. This is the point at which I begin to part company

I.D ip lo ma ti c I nv es tig a ti on s, o p. c it. P' 33.3 Ibid . p. 33

2. Ibid . p. 32.4. Ibid . p. I02.


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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 115with Martin Wight and to wonder whether there was not, after all, somevalue in the demand of the behaviourists that International Theory beput on a proper methodological footing.

I have tried in this lecture not to lose sight of those aspects of \Vight'swork with which it is possible to quarrel. Let me mention some moreof them. The term Wight used to describe the enterprise he was engagedin - International Theory - is not a good one; as Professor Manningpointed out long ago it is the Relations that are International not theTheory; the enterprise is better described as Theory of InternationalRelations.

Wight's contribution is vulnerable to the charge of being undulyEurocentric. It is the glory of his work that it sprang from a mastery ofWestern culture, ancient and medieval no lessthan modern. But althoughhe took some account of Islam and of Ghandi and played with theidea that there was a Chinese equivalent of the debate among the threetraditions - in the conflict of Confucianism, Taoism and the School ofLaw - he had no deep understanding of non-Western civilizations. Hesaw modern international society as the product of Western culture andfelt, I think, a basic doubt as to how far the non-Western majority ofstates today have really been incorporated within it. I should not myselfleap to the conclusion that in this he was wrong, but he does sometimesdisplay insensitivity about non-Western peoples and their aspirationstoday, as in his contemptuous dismissal of Kautilya or his comparisonbetween the Afro-Asian powers and the revisionist powers of the 1930s.Wight's immense learning sometimes does more to encumber thanto enrich his arguments: his intellectual architecture is not so muchclassical as baroque. His learning is entirely authentic: Wight was not acultural showman or pedant, and had a great gift of apt quotation. But insome of his writings the branches of the tree are so weighed down withhistorical foliage that it is difficult to find the trunk.

I have often felt uneasy about the extent to which Wight's view ofInternational Relations derives from his religious beliefs. These beliefsare not obtrusive in his writings about secular matters, which apparentlyemploy only the ordinary canons of empirical knowledge of the world.And yet one is conscious of the extent to which his view of the subject isaffectedby beliefs not derived in this way.

What can one learn from Martin \Vight's example? He was a person ofunique gifts and no one else is likely to contribute to the subject in quitethe way that he did. But three aspects of his work in this field are worthyof note by others.

The first is his view that theoretical inquiry into InternationalRelations should be focused upon the moral and normative presup-positions that underly it. In the 1950Sand 1960sthere was a tendency inthe Western world to leave these presuppositions out of account: toinquire into the international system without inquiring into its moraland cultural basis, to discuss policy choices - as in strategic studies or


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I I 6 MARTIN WIGHT Julydevelopment economics - in terms of means or techniques rather thanin terms of ends. More recently, values or ends have made a comeback,but chieflyin the form of the shouting of slogans, the fashion of so-calledpolitical commitment, which means that values are asserted and at thesame time held to be beyond examination. Wight stood, it appears to me,not simply for having value premises but for inquiring into them.

The second is his attempt to associate theoretical inquiry with his-torical inquiry. The professional diplomatic historians, on the whole,have not been interested in large questions of theory. The theorists ofInternational Relations have lacked the capacity or the inclination todo the historical work. Or they have approached it in the belief thatit consists of "data", to be fed into the computer, and without any realgrasp of historical inquiry itself. Wight is one of the few to have bridgedthis gap with distinction.The third and the most important is Wight's very deep commitmentto intellectual values and to the highest academic standards. Especially,perhaps, in a field such as International Relations there is a temptation tostudy what is ephemeral rather than of enduring importance, to beknowing rather than to say only what one truly knows, to claim resultsprematurely rather than to persist in the long haul. The most impressivething about Martin Wight was his intellectual and moral integrity andgravitas. His writings are marked by paucity, but at least we cannot sayof them, as he said of theoretical writings about International Relationsbefore him, that they are marked also by intellectual and moral poverty.

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